Does it have to be Acrobat Pro 8 to work this smoothly? Or is 7.0 good
enough?

>>> <EMAIL REMOVED> 12/11/2007 11:42:51 AM >>>

Lisa,

I support Mike's suggestion to use Adobe Acrobat Professional to do
this
conversion. With Office 2003, I have used other PDF conversion
programs
(free or shareware) and I do not think they produced accessible
documents
even if the original document was accessible (ALTs for images, etc.).
The
Acrobat Professional has an "accessibility wizard" that will test the
document and provide a play-by-play description on how to fix the file
to
pass the accessibility test. This works with MS Office 2003 and newer.
Some
PDF conversions will "pass" without having to do anything else, some
will
not, and in my experimentation, it seems the older the document, the
greater
the chance it would NOT pass and need additional tweaking.

I recently updated to MS Office 2007 (and I am sorry I did, but that's
another story) and the Acrobat Professional plug-in automatically
installed
into the Office 2007 suite. It seems to work just fine.

BTW, the most difficult documents to make accessible are those created
with
desktop publishing software, like MS-Publisher and Adobe PageMaker. Not
sure
if the newer versions work better - I'm still testing - but if content
is in
columns or moved around the document (e.g., continue on page 5 types
of
layout) it will be difficult to create an accessible document.
PageMaker was
better at this than Publisher 2003.

Let's say you have a scenario where end users (like clients) have to
convert their Word, Powerpoint and Excel files to PDF or other
accessible formats. I'm not just talking about simple Word docs, but
also Word forms and PPTs with multimedia components.